How We Remember Them Matters

On this Memorial Day, as we honor those who have died serving our country, let us remember them well. For how we remember them, in a sense, is how they are resurrected within us and our life.

“They live on in us.” We say these words, but we don’t quite give them the credence they deserve. They do live on in us. Through our memories, their living moments are given breath again. Their stories are shared and with them, their laughter, their tears, and their love, can be felt and passed on to our children and then to theirs. Even the silent memories, secretly viewed in those solitary midnight moments, are bearing life.

It is a beautiful thing, a powerful thing, an immortality of another kind— instead of breathing life into the bereaved, remembering is more like an inhale. We breathe their life into us that we may carry it forward. The soldier may have fallen, but the flag flies on in our hearts.

So let us be mindful of how we remember them today.

How will we ask them to live on? In our tears or our laughter? Our regret or our acceptance? Our loss or our gain?

Will we painfully linger in the memory of how they died? Or courageously raise the flag of how they lived?

Though it can be difficult to move into grief’s sweet release of acceptance—especially when it comes to violent deaths or those befallen the young—we can find the strength. Despite the restless memory of their death and the dreams of their life hanging like an unfinished conversation, the conversation isn’t over.

They do live on because we live on. How we remember them can leave us haunted or inspirited, and can resurrect them with fear or with the courage of love held high. It is a legacy of our choosing.